Bantustan Days, Part 7: Two Hamas parliamentarians

On February 22, I conducted an interview with two parliamentarians from the Hamas-affiliated ‘Change and Reform’ bloc. They were Mahmoud Musleh, elected to one of the five constituency-based seats elected from Ramallah/al-Bireh (where Hamas won four of the five seats), and Dr. Ayman Daraghmeh, who was #20 of the 29 people elected from Change and Reform’s nationwide list.
They told me that of the 52 Hamas parliamentarians based in the West Bank, 41 were in prison in Israel. Indeed, Musleh had only recently been released.
I met them in Daraghmeh’s office in Ramallah. Daraghmeh seems to be in his forties and is, I believe, a medical doctor. Musleh is in his late sixties. It was a cold day, and Musleh was wearing a good warm woolen abaya over his pants-and-jacket outfit, and a traditional-style keffiyeh headscarf. Daraghmeh was in a western-style suit. (Fwiw, I might add that both men reached out their hands to shake mine. When I interviewed two male Hamas MPs in Hebron a few days later, they notably chose not to.)
I started out by asking Musleh quite a lot of questions about the treatment he and the other Palestinian political prisoners had received in prison. He told me first how hard it is whenever the detainees have court hearings: they’re wakened very early, taken in a van with nothing to hang onto– and them with handcuffs and leg-shackles, being thrown around in the back of the van– to a holding center near Ramleh; held there overnight and then taken from there to the courtroom. He said there is a lot of aimless waiting around. After the hearing they are taken back to Ramleh for another night, then back to the prison-camp, and with all the transfers made in the same very uncomfortable and often painful way in the vans.
The prison-camp he was held in was near B’ir Saba. He also talked a bit about the lousy medical treatment the prisoners receive. The ICRC visits the prisoners, he said, “every few months.”
He explained that generally, the political prisoners from all the different Palestinian factions were held together. Their morale was good, he said, and they got along very well together. However, when the Gaza war started, the prison authorities started to separate them according to their affiliation.
I then asked them was about their expectations from the intra-Palestinian dialogue, which was scheduled to start in Cairo three days later. Daraghmeh said that the most important reconciliation to be effected was that between Hamas and Fateh,

and the main two issues we need to agree on are reform of the PLO and reform of the security forces. Forming the new government will not be so hard, compared with those.

He said that reforming the PLO, which is the parent body of the Palestinian Authority and represents all the Palestinians, both inside and outside the occupied territories, would require “a new kind of PNC—one that represents all Palestinians.” The PNC– Palestinian National Council– is the broad, allegedly representative body that makes policy for the PLO’s 18-person Executive Committee.
Daraghmeh spelled out that,

The PNC needs to be formed on the basis of new elections to it. It should comprise the 132 PLC members plus the 18 Executive Committee members plus 150 PNC members from outside the occupied territories, as stipulated in the 2005 Cairo Agreement.

For those outside, we’d like to see them chosen by elections where possible; and where that’s not possible, they should be chosen in the same proportion as exists in the elected PLC.

The new PNC would oversee all the files of the PLO including the financial and diplomatic-activities files.

Back in 1994-96, when the Palestinian Authority (PA) was being formed– as a strictly interim body charged by the Oslo Agreement with providing limited self-governance to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza pending completion of a final-status peace and, as the Palestinians hoped, full national sovereignty– Hamas was still so deeply critical of Oslo that it bycotted the PA completely. The decision Hamas later made to compete in the 2006elections to the PA’s legislative council thus marked a significant shift in its position.
Now, at a time when some important secular-nationalist intellectuals like Sari Nuseibeh and Mustafa Barghouthi were starting to consider whether dismantling the PA might be better than keeping it alive, it was notable that Daraghmeh said bluntly that the PA should remain. “Now, there exist new facts on the ground, and we are a part of the PA. But now, it’s the PLO that needs re-organizing.”
Musleh also wanted to answer my question about the two men’s expectations regarding intra-Palestinian reconciliation:

I’d like to say that the security file is the single most important one to be discussed there because it’s related to three imortant issues: First, the relationship between resistance and negotiations; second, security relations between the PA and the occupation; and third, the role of the Americans in influencing our Palestinian security forces.

The PLO issue can perhaps be resolved: it’s a question of reorganizing the structures, and so on. But the security file is linked to the Americans, and linked to security ‘coordination’ with Israel.

How can Fateh or the PA make changes in that sphere without the agreement of the US or Israel?

I suggested there had perhaps been something of a change in the US view.
Musleh:

If there’s a change in the US view then why did John Kerry, when he was in Gaza, accuse Hamas of responsibility for the damage there without showing any balance of concern for our people? And Kerry is said to be close to Barack Obama. He must be more balanced!

Daraghmeh:

We know that John Kerry met with Hillary Clinton before he came here, so we assume he must have gotten a green light to visit Gaza. That was a good change, yes. But it doesn’t mean they are going to change fast. We expect that they’ll change only slowly toward a position of fairness.

Musleh:

But when Kerry saw all that destruction and saw so many bereaved people… and then he said it was all because of the Hamas rockets—that wasn’t just!

The violence comes from the occupation, and what we do is resistance. Also, we don’t even have borders, so how can they ask us to recognize Israel?

I tell you, I’m now 67 years old, and I have always heard this call from the west that we Palestinians need to be ‘patient’, we need to ‘understand’ the position of the Americans or the others. But they’re just trying to stuff a pacifier into our mouth! They’re treating us like babies!

How can we have any trust that this time there really is a change?

I asked the two men their views on a two-state solution. Daraghmeh replied:

Fateh and Hamas and all the factions agreed in the prisoners’ document of 2006 that they would rally round the goal of an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital and the return of the refugees.

Me: “Does all of Hamas including Khaled Meshaal agree to this?”
Daraghmeh: “Khaled Meshaal has certainly given good indications that he could support the two-state solution.”
Musleh:

But why is the west always asking us the hard questions, and placing conditions on the Palestinians, but never on the Israelis? After all, what is the meaning of the call for an exclusively Jewish state? Is this in the interest of international peace and security?

We returned to the subject of the intra-Palestinian reconciliation effort. Daraghmeh made the interesting observation that this effort is probably not easy for Fateh:

Fateh has many fears around this project. One is about the growth of Hamas. Another is that they’re afraid Hamas will create an alternative to the PLO. A third fear arises from their knowledge that Fateh is not unified. They actually have some people, who’re now in the leadership positions, who have an interest in the continuation of the occupation. But there is also a strong trend in opposition to that inside Fateh, so they’re afraid of an internal coup… If, during the Cairo meetings, there’s any big public reckoning of their leadership’s actions, this could be explosive for them internally.

Fateh people know, though, that if there’s a reconciliation they will have to pay a price for that.

You know, after the 2006 elections, they wanted to destroy Hamas, but they failed completely.

… So Fateh’s people know they will pay a price either way, whether Fateh does reconciliation with us, or whether it does not.

We can assure them, though, that if they agree to a renewal of the PLO along the lines we propose, then we would not work to make an alternative to the PLO.

Musleh added:

Hamas requires from Fateh that we have a true participation in decisionmaking, on a democratic basis and in a comprehensive way—in the PLO’s political program and in all of its projects. We in Hamas are ready for this participation.

If we had a strong leader to deal with in Fateh, we could finish the negotiations much more quickly! Yes, someone like Marwan Barghouthi. The problem with Abu Mazen is that he’s unable to negotiate, because he doesn’t control the movement’s base any more.

I asked if Hamas had any desire or plans to try to hold Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) accountable for the many misdeeds they accuse him of. Musleh said one of the committees to be formed from the cairo talks would look into everyone’s misdeeds from the past. “But basically we want a new page,” he said.
Daraghmeh added that according the PA’s basic Law, “the PLC doesn’t have the right to hold the President acountable. It’s a real weakness in our system.” He added that there is still a serious question about the legitimacy of Abbas staying on as president even though his term expired on January 9. “Maybe we could keep him on until there are new elections,” he said.
I asked them to talk more about the posture adopted by the PA’s security forces.
Musleh:

As we said before, this is linked to international considerations– and also to party considerations.

How can Salam Fayyad be in charge of the PA’s security affairs when he has no popular support and no legitimate mandate at all for that? But there he is: He’s the one who’s in charge of the security decisions for the PA.

Now, you know, they’ve thrown everyone out of the security forces who has anything higher than a secondary education. What are they trying to achieve with that?

Daraghmeh said that when Fayyad agreed to become prime minister in June 2007, he insisted he be given the security portfolio. “Even Fateh is not happy about that,” he said. “Many of them are very ready to see a new government appointed.”
Musleh said he saw Fayyad as starting to play the same (essentially Quisling-like) role as the one Antoine Lahad used to play on the Israelis’ behalf, in South Lebanon prior to 2000.
Daraghmeh said he thought many Fateh people feared that Fayyad was trying to infiltrate and undermine their movement.
I then asked how much trust Hamas had in Egypt’s role as an honest broker in the three Hamas-related negotiations it had been brokering: with Fateh over the internal reconciliation, and with Israel over stabilizing the Gaza ceasefire and over the long-discussed prisoner exchange.
Musleh:

It’s not really a question of Hamas having blind trust in the Egyptian regime, but of both sides having an interest in having a functioning working relationship.

Daraghmeh expanded on that a little:

We know that Egypt doesn’t want Gaza to remain under Hamas control, but they realize they need to have an agreement with us if they want to prevent the situation getting out of control. And for the people in Gaza, Egypt is the only avenue to the outside world.

I asked whether they didn’t see a danger that, if Gaza is indeed opened to the outside world through Egypt– as Hamas’s Gaza-based Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahhar has urged for a long time– the Strip might become more cut off than ever from the West Bank.
Musleh:

But there is no connection between Gaza and the West Bank, right now, anyway! Fateh are accusing us of splitting the two territories apart, but it’s just psychological warfare on their part. Hamas certainly doesn’t seek such a split.

Daraghmeh:

Anyway, you don’t have to have all the lands connected. It could be like Pakistan used to be.

Musleh:

But you also need to understand, the Palestinian people are not just in the West Bank and Gaza. There are also those inside 1948 Israel, and the Palestinians who are all over the world– more than ten million of them.

Hamas represents the Palestinian people in the whole world. This is a problem for Fateh, politically, because they are afraid they are losing their bases of political support around the world.

He said that during the war on Gaza, Fateh had become particularly worried about its waning support among Palestinians in the diaspora. He then pulled from his pocket a much-worn clipping from an Arabic-language newspaper, dated January 12, that carried a report of around 100 people, described as “PLO supporters” who had participated in an anti-Hamas demonstration in Frankfurt, Germany.
“That’s what Fateh has been doing!” he said in disgust. “It is they who have been working for division.”
(I should note here that one of the first things the participants agreed on after the Cairo reconciliation conference opened on February 25 was to stop the media war they had been waging against each other. I wish I had been able to publish this report on the interview with Daraghmeh and Musleh before then. Readers should note again that the interview was conducted on February 22.)